The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation launched with flying colors! (Green and black, to be specific.) Although we’ve been a bit quiet in public, there’s a lot of activity going on behind the scenes.

IFTF has taken stewardship of the annual Interactive Fiction Competition (aka IFComp)! This means that IFComp effectively owns its code and copyrights, which greatly increases IFComp’s security and stability going into year 22.

This will be another prolific year for IFComp. We’re accepting games right now, and so far we’re we’re expecting several dozen games (even with allowances for authors who don’t complete games in time). The player base will be much larger - over 20,000 people played games in 2015, and we’re bracing for an even larger crowd this year. To facilitate this year’s competition, Jason McIntosh has recruited volunteers to assist with entry verification, ballot review, tools development, and communicating with authors and judges. Games will be released to the public on October 1.

IFComp is also accepting prize donations for 2016. Right now, more than 20 prizes are in the pool, ranging from books and games to money and gift certificates. If you’d like to donate a prize for distribution to an IFComp author, please email Jason McIntosh at ifcomp@ifcomp.org.

We’ve been moving more slowly on other projects, both to give proper attention to IFComp and because we want to do them right. We’re in the process of putting together a committee for the IFTF Accessibility Testing Project (aka the Testathon), chaired by #a11y expert Deborah Kaplan. Once the committee has sorted out our tools and methodology for the Testathon, we’ll put out a call for volunteers and get this ball rolling!

We’re also in the process of building the Twine Committee, chaired by Twine creator and IFTF cofounder Chris Klimas. Rather than focusing solely on development of the Twine application, this project will encompass the entire ecosystem surrounding Twine, such as related software and utilities, documentation, discussion forums, and websites that host and archive Twine works.

Speaking of Chris Klimas, he recently appeared on Ken Gagne’s podcast Polygamer. It’s a fantastic 70-minute interview covering everything from IFTF itself to Twine to broader interactive fiction topics, and you can check it out here.

One last thing: IFTF is now registered with Amazon Smile! If you shop on Amazon via smile.amazon.com, you can choose “Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation” as your charity (here’s a convenient link for that purpose) and IFTF will receive a charitable donation each time you purchase through Amazon Smile at no cost to you. IFTF is also registered with the PayPal Giving Fund, which allows for one-time donations or regular donations to IFTF without any PayPal fees.